At the grunt gallery until February 6

Living in Cultural Olympiad Land, it’s easy to overlook the fine exhibitions happening outside its boundaries. And rich as the Vanoc-sponsored visual-art projects may be, it’s worth taking in some of the other offerings that define what it is to be an artist working in this time and place. Sean George’s Bad Boys, for instance, is a modest yet effective mixed-media installation at the grunt gallery. Subtitled Portraits of Mediated Performance, the work asks us to reconsider a couple of hot topics of the 1980s and ’90s: identity politics and the cultural construction of gender roles. George’s focus here is on what he calls in his artist’s statement “the masquerade of masculinity”—from athlete and rock star to cowboy, soldier, and corporate CEO.

George reminds us that, despite the ebbs and flows of cultural theory, critical appraisal, and curatorial fashion, some subjects are worth revisiting. As with many of the issues raised by feminist, environmental, and social-justice art of past decades, it’s not as if the problems have been solved. Individuals and groups—young and old, male and female, gay and straight, black and white—still suffer because of entrenched ideas surrounding what it is men are and do.

George opened his exhibition with a poetic performance, employing simple strategies of song, dance, selected readings, prerecorded narratives, and projected images derived from art history and popular culture. From Rufus Wainwright’s plaintive song “Poses” to Francisco Goya’s execution painting The Third of May, and from playing Pete Townshend–style air guitar against thrashing rock ’n’ roll to childhood recollections of watching World War II documentaries with his grandfather, George explored the various roles boys and men are cast into, willingly or not.

Many of the images used in the performance are reiterated in the installation. These include clippings of hot, hip, and sweatily ripped men from an assortment of publications, along with representations of manliness from posters, album covers, and film stills. Wall-mounted texts are drawn from sources as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Cormac McCarthy, and art-historical allusions include Renaissance depictions of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and the crucifixion of Christ.

George effectively treats the interior of the gallery as a continuous collage, the space punctuated with three-dimensional male mannequins dressed in an assortment of “costumes”. Tucked into one corner of the installation are images that allude to the intersection of cultural and sexual stereotypes and gender orientation. As illustrated by “Indian chiefs” in feathered headdresses and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of pumped and naked black men, this subject suggests rich ground for the artist to till in the future.